By John Fryar
Daily Times-Call
LONGMONT, Colo. — Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle is asking county commissioners to add four more deputies and two nurses to the county jail staff in next year’s budget.
Pelle and Undersheriff Tom Shomaker met with the Board of County Commissioners on Thursday to preview the request he’ll be formally making when the county staff starts fielding departments’ 2016 budget proposals later this year.
Adding the four deputies and two nurses could cost a projected $466,929 to $485,606 a year but would reduce the jail staffing overtime expenses the sheriff’s office has been running up annually, Pelle and Shomaker said.
“The jail is currently spending its entire annual overtime budget every three months,” Pelle said in a May 20 letter asking for Thursday’s meeting with the commissioners. “In the first four months of 2015, they spent $164,000 total in overtime.”
Pelle wrote that only $135,000 is earmarked for overtime in the jail’s 2015 total budget under the overall county spending package the commissioners adopted last year. But he said the jail is on pace to spend about $450,000 to $500,000 on overtime by the end of this year.
The commissioners, who will hold budget hearings in the fall and formally adopt a 2016 budget in December, did not indicate on Thursday whether they might support the sheriff’s request.
“We probably will have some more questions for you” before then, said Commissioner Cindy Domenico.
Pelle suggested during Thursday’s meeting and in his earlier letter that the jail’s budget problems are due in part to increasing numbers of prisoners, the numbers of trials, and the responsibility for transporting prisoners to medical appointments, court, or other jurisdictions’ jails.
There’s been “no real increase” in jail staffing over the past five to six years, Pelle said. Shomaker said there are 92 deputies assigned to the jail now, with their assignments spread over work shifts.
Pelle told commissioners Thursday that “there’s nothing discretionary about these positions” he’s seeking.
“There has to be so many deputies and so many nurses on station every shift or the jail can’t run,” he said in his letter. “We also have to pick up and transport prisoners to court and to and from institutions when told to do so, and each trip requires two deputies.”
Pelle said jail deputies now have to work mandatory overtime and must be on call for that duty.
“That’s no way to run a division on an ongoing basis and is causing burn-out and complaints,” Pelle wrote. “Secondly, one of the highest users of overtime in the jail is the nursing unit. They are having trouble keeping up with the high demand.”
He said his 2016 budget proposal would add a deputy to each work shift team and one more nurse per shift during the busiest parts of the day. He said he’ll also be seeking an increase in the jail’s overtime account.
Pelle said a staffing study suggests that the jail needs 12 more deputies, rather than just four, and the equivalent of 2.5 more full-time nurses, instead of two.
“I know that is not realistic and that we have to go at this a few bites at a time,” he said.